Ilana Walder-Biesanz

In The Marsh’s small San Francisco theater, watching Lorri Holt speak as Colette is like having a conversation with the most interesting person you have ever met. Writers Zack Rogow and Lorri Holt frame their play as a lecture in celebration of Gigi, but it’s more of a cozy...

The national tour of Wicked couldn’t possibly be less than fabulous. Stephen Schwartz’s score combines the infuriatingly catchy with the beautifully lyrical. His clever lyrics provoke laughs with their well-rhymed mix of real SAT vocabulary words and made-up imitations (confusifying, disgusticified). The whole plot—based on Gregory Maguire’s novel of...

Tanya Barfield’s The Call is nominally a play about adoption. As such, the premise (an exploration of a couple’s excitement and doubts about adopting a daughter from Africa) intrigued me. Two of my siblings are adopted from abroad, and I imagined I would connect with the characters’ struggles. In...

Three a cappella group members walk into the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It’s not the start of a joke; it’s the birth of a musical. Or a rock opera. Or a staged concept album. It’s hard to pin down what, precisely The Unfortunates is, but it doesn’t need to be...

Ilana Walder-Biesanz reviews the World Premiere of a new play by Katharine Sherman about Ondine, a water sprite.

I have a confession to make: I don’t know anything about Argentine Tango. So when I write about Luis Bravo’s Forever Tango, I can say whether the music was exciting, whether the show was theatrical, and whether the dancing was impressive, but I can’t say whether the tango was...

A Christmas Carol is the story of a withered soul reawakened through imagination. The miserly Scrooge must discover what matters in life. Even if none of us watching this show at the American Conservatory Theater are quite as far gone as Scrooge, we could all use a reminder of...

Clever writing and an outstanding cast make this new musical comedy a feel-good hit, all the murders notwithstanding.

A talented cast at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company holds the show together through all its twists and turns.

30 new plays by 31 local writers make for imaginative evening of theater.